Killing for Christ, War Was a "Crusade"

Update: A quick read of CommonDreams presents well the problem Obama faces if he continues down the Bush-Cheney-Rice-Rumsfeld road. See Changing Obama's Mindset (Howard Zinn), The Media’s Collective Yawn Over Torture for War (Joy-Ann Reid), These Killings Will Only Strengthen the Taliban (Patrick Cockburn), The NYT Sums up Obama's Civil Liberties Record in One Paragraph (Glenn Greenwald). As our Cheney once advised: Stick to principle.

Frank Rich in his Obama Can't Turn the Page on Bush column points to a must-read by Robert Draper in GQ Magazine on Donald Rumsfeld.

Draper reports that Rumsfeld’s monomaniacal determination to protect his Pentagon turf led him to hobble and antagonize America’s most willing allies in Iraq, Britain and Australia, and even to undermine his own soldiers. But Draper’s biggest find is a collection of daily cover sheets that Rumsfeld approved for the Secretary of Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update, a highly classified digest prepared for a tiny audience, including the president, and often delivered by hand to the White House by the defense secretary himself. These cover sheets greeted Bush each day with triumphal color photos of the war headlined by biblical quotations. GQ is posting 11 of them, and they are seriously creepy.

This is the same Rumsfeld who spoke of the "humanity' with which we invaded Iraq, and along with Cheney ordered that people be tortured to speak of the non-existent Saddam-Al Qaeda connection.

Writes Draper:

Onward Christian Soldiers!
These never-before-seen documents from the Rumsfeld Pentagon mixed religion and war.

In the days surrounding the U.S. invasion of Iraq, cover sheets—like the ones in this exclusive GQ.com slideshow—began adorning the top-secret intelligence briefings produced by Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon. The sheets juxtaposed war images with inspirational Bible quotes and were delivered by Rumsfeld himself to the White House, where they were read by the man who, just after September 11, referred to America's war on terror [sic] as a 'crusade.'

Let's hope each revelation leads to Obama reversing the wars and crimes against humanity that Bush-Cheney-Rice-Rumsfeld committed with impunity.

Watching the GQ.com slideshow, a reader laughs, scoffs, and sadly ruminates on the degree to which these depraved lies are going to continue under Obama's administration.

Nuremberg and Guantánamo Bay

“That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.”
— Justice Robert H. Jackson's Opening Statement before the International Military Tribunal, November 21, 1945, at Nuremberg, Germany in Case No. 1: The United States of America, the French Republic, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics v. Hermann Wilhelm Göring, et al.

This summer, the world will see how profoundly the United States has fallen when the administration's military tribunal-'kangaroo court' spectacle tries six 9/11 mass murderers using confession-obtained-by-torture evidence, secret evidence, and severely diminished due process in a judicial pretence so appalling that the Pentagon's own chief prosecutor, Air Force Col. Morris Davis, and two other prosecutors resigned in protest, as the administration has arranged for a rigged political show trial at which the world will be dismayed.

Bin Laden Is Not Important, Republicans Now Say

The Republicans invent their own reality: About the imminence of a Shia caliphate (Islamic state) taking over the world, about the Sunni bin Laden changing everything about America so that George W. Bush must have special powers to fight him and our Constitution changed to prevent attacks from him.

But when bin Laden gets on tape demonstrating the idiocy not just of Bush's military policy, but Bush's competence, Republican reactions change fast:

Via Steve Benen at Crook and Liars:
Fred Thompson’s reaction to today’s Osama bin Laden tape:
“Bin Laden is more symbolism than anything else,” he said.

Mitt Romney on bin Laden: [Romney] said the country would be safer by only “a small percentage” and would see “a very insignificant increase in safety” if al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden was caught because another terrorist would rise to power. “It’s not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person,” Romney said.

George W. Bush on bin Laden: “I truly am not that concerned about him.”

Benen asks, "At what point did the GOP decide that bin Laden no longer matters? And how would the right respond if Dems made similar comments?"

Here's a good one by Greg Saunders at This Modern World:

These Colors Sorta Run

What happens when a grandstanding fool whipped into a patriotic fervor makes a sucker’s bet that George W. Bush would do a good job?

Bob Flournoy swore after 9/11 that he would wear the same patriotic tie until the day Osama bin Laden was captured or killed.

He figured that it would take the USA a couple of weeks to find the notorious terrorist leader. Despite that miscalculation — it’s been almost six years — the city attorney has kept his word. He’s been wearing the same red-white-and-blue necktie since the attacks on America.

“It looks like Francis Scott Key’s Star-Spangled Banner,” Flournoy tells The Lufkin (Texas) Daily News. “It is faded, worn and tattered. It has been reworked, patched and pieced together. Velcro has been added around the neck because it is too fragile to tie and untie. It is smaller and even a little smelly, but it is still a grand old flag. Betsy Ross would be proud. . . .

“If Bin Laden is alive, I challenge him to prove it by Sept. 11, 2007,” Flournoy says. “If he does not come forward with some proof, I am personally going to declare him dead, and I will be able to take off my tie and give it a proper burial.”

Poor guy just wants to take off his smelly tie and in a few more days…
Crap. Osama just messed with the wrong Texan.

Flournoy said he has had enough of waiting for proof of bin Laden’s death. He thinks his friends and those around him every day will be very happy once he stops wearing the tie.

“Flies kind of gather around me, and I don’t have quite as many friends,” Flournoy said.. . .

“If by chance Bin Laden is not dead and proves it by Sept. 11th, I offer to meet him, man to man, at the park at City Hall and fight him to the death of one of us,” Flournoy said. “He just can’t kill Americans and get away with it.”

Flournoy doubts his challenge will reach Tora Bora, but wants a way to put his tattered old flag tie to rest once and for all.

“It’s been fun, but the fun’s about to end,” Flournoy said.

Writes Saunders: "That’s right, Osama. You’re about to get your ass kicked by somebody wearing a disgusting tie. Let’s Roll!"

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Bush Lies on Iraq Persist

Today's New York Times points to Bush's new reliance on Al Qaeda as the reason we need stay in Iraq. Of-course, Bush's delusions do not include the fact that the Iraqis, with its diverse and complex forces, would no sooner accept an Al Qaeda stronghold once the U.S. leaves, than it would accept an American stronghold.

But the idiot Bush will let 1,000s more die before he would admit he is wrong.

Bush Distorts Qaeda Links, Critics Assert

By MICHAEL R. GORDON and JIM RUTENBERG

BAGHDAD, July 12 — In rebuffing calls to bring troops home from Iraq, President Bush on Thursday employed a stark and ominous defense. “The same folks that are bombing innocent people in Iraq,” he said, “were the ones who attacked us in America on September the 11th, and that’s why what happens in Iraq matters to the security here at home.”

It is an argument Mr. Bush has been making with frequency in the past few months, as the challenges to the continuation of the war have grown. On Thursday alone, he referred at least 30 times to Al Qaeda or its presence in Iraq.

But his references to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, and his assertions that it is the same group that attacked the United States in 2001, have greatly oversimplified the nature of the insurgency in Iraq and its relationship with the Qaeda leadership.

There is no question that the group is one of the most dangerous in Iraq. But Mr. Bush’s critics argue that he has overstated the Qaeda connection in an attempt to exploit the same kinds of post-Sept. 11 emotions that helped him win support for the invasion in the first place.

Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia did not exist before the Sept. 11 attacks. ...

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The MAeLstrom

[A scan of news articles and commentary on the internet.]

Update:

The Jerusalem Post reports that the Israeli Air Force is training to bomb Iran.

That's great, the air strike, predicted by many in the reality-based community, is likely to kill many innocent civilians in Iran and destabilize much of the world.

The Israeli Air Force (IAF) has been training on long-range flights, including refueling in mid-flight, in preparation for potential strikes against Iranian nuclear targets.

The training program has been taking place for some time but has only been released for publication Friday, the Ma'ariv daily reported.

Intelligence assessments received by the defense establishment concur that once Iran passes the point of no return in its nuclear efforts, the entire Middle East will enter a frantic nuclear armament race. Egypt and Saudi Arabia are expected to take the lead should such a scenario become reality.

At the end of 2007 the US and Israel are expected to hold a joint assessment to ascertain the influence of economic sanctions against Iran.

A new package of upgraded sanctions prepared jointly by Israel and the US, includes exerting pressure on European governments to cancel US $22 billion in loan guarantees given annually to European companies trading with Iran.

The new package also includes sanctions against banks working with Iran, non-renewal of oil infrastructure in Iran and a long series of economic actions that are meant to seriously hurt the Iranian economy.
Following the end-of-year assessment, Washington will decide how to move forward in the struggle against Iran's nuclear race.

Members of the international community - the US and Israel leading - are convinced that Iran's race to enrich uranium is aimed at producing nuclear weapons. The Islamic Republic, on its side, insists it is looking for energy sources that would be an alternative to fossil fuels.

Iran has so far remained defiant in face of the demands voiced by the international community that it make its nuclear program transparent to UN-mandated monitoring.

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Top American newspapers report that the surge is failing. Though the US occupation is illegal, brutal, and stupidly conceived, the latest assessments from the mainstream media are that it is also failing.

New York Times: Militants Said to Flee Before U.S. Offensive — John Burns writes that even the generals let the truth drip out: “The operational commander of troops battling to drive fighters with Al Qaeda from Baquba said Friday that 80 percent of the top Qaeda leaders in the city fled before the American-led offensive began earlier this week.”

Iraq Push Revives Criticism of Force Size — Thomas E. Ricks at the Post reports same: The major U.S. offensive launched last weekend against insurgents in and around Baghdad has significantly expanded the military's battleground in Iraq -- 'a surge of operations,' and no longer just of troops, as the second-ranking U.S. commander there said yesterday -- but it has renewed concerns about whether even the bigger U.S. troop presence there is large enough.

Bill O’Reilly to American Newspapers: Americans Hate You — Think Progress reports that Bill O’Reilly, who fancies himself a military leader and regularly rages against those with whom he disagrees as not knowing how to “defend America,” said American newspapers will fail as journals because Americans “hate you” and your "liberal" ideology. Likely, the reporting of the latest failings of the surge in the Times and Post will not please Col. O’Reilly.

Bush claims oversight exemption too — Josh Meyer's piece in the LA Times notes: "The White House says the president's own order on classified data does not apply to his office or the vice president's."

Vets Attacked by Gov for Protesting War — Highlights from Kirsten Scharnberg’s piece in the Chicago Tribune:

The young combat veteran stared at the letter in disbelief. It accused him of being "disloyal," a word hard to swallow for a man who had risked his life to serve his nation.

The Marine Corps was recommending him for "other than honorable discharge." The letter alleged he had violated the Uniform Code of Military Justice by wearing part of his uniform during an anti-war rally. Furthermore, the letter accused him of being "disloyal," a word hard to swallow for a man who had risked his life to serve his nation.

A Zogby poll last year showed that war critics ... may not be entirely on the fringes of the mainstream military. The poll of 944 U.S. military personnel in Iraq conducted by Zogby International and Le Moyne College found that 72 percent believed the U.S. should pull out within one year.

"The unrest has been churning below the surface for a while," said Madden, who is still waiting to see what will become of his less-than-honorable discharge recommendation. "But now the signs of that unrest are starting to be readily apparent."

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